Comment by fps_doug | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fps_doug | Hacker News Reader

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> the techies inside unversities are horrendously underfunded. m365 at least will bring consistency and will probably also make your date more secure to third party actors.

True, but no reason to dig an even deeper hole.

> of course it would be possible to have everything open source. BUT with our current governement M365 is the best solution. the cdu sleeped for over 20 years to have a great open source solution. so it would be impossible to have something integrated ready within a short window, it would also blow a huge budget. the only thing you can be mad about is our government, the m365 is the best thing that could happen.

You're completely ignoring that I'm complaining about the move to the cloud, and the restrictiveness of the contract. Even just continuing the old contract and staying with offline-Office would have been better.

> btw. I hate the strange bashing against american companies, as if german companies are any better (they are not).

I never even hinted at this being about Microsoft being American. I don't want my University to upload my PII to "the cloud" so I can use Word in a Browser.

You're basically saying we shouldn't even be trying anymore. Why not shut down the CS departments of universities entirely and just hand out accounts to Skillshare et al., so those still interested in CS can learn from there? There's nothing left a University could offer that you can't access from there. Maybe a couple credits for the Azure cloud if you need to do something computationally intensive. Your University surely doesn't have anything left in-house for this anyways.

I worked at a company where they from the start were building all their internal tools like their own Jira-like system, their own Slack and so on. When you started working, for the first three to six months you were only working on those tools and also learning the internal culture. Then when the company had idle time or if you wanted you could continue working on them.

I am thinking that universities have missed huge opportunity to build their own m365. If they started 20 years ago, by now they would have mature system tailored for their own organisation. But you needed people with vision and able to get others on their side. Something like this would be perfect for CS students, to have a taste of the corporate real world before even starting their professional life. Unfortunately these days I don't see much value in universities when it comes to CS. It may be useful for networking as you get a chance to meet like minded people and spend time with them, but other than that you can learn everything online mostly for free these days. Something like 20 years ago universities had advantage that they had resources you wouldn't otherwise get, but now that advantage is gone. Many people just see it as a fun time outside of parents' home and don't take it seriously.

The universities did build such systems. See Andrew at CMU or Athena at MIT. They built a ton of infrastructure, from distributed file systems (afs) to chat systems (zephyr), word processors (ez), multimedia email (messages) and so on.

Some developments from those projects live on today, such as Kerberos. But most of those innovations had crappy user interfaces and never made it outside the university. Commercial companies took their ideas and built products mere mortals could use. Now there is no reason not to use the commercial products that are more stable, more secure, and have more applicability outside the university. Plus you have to serve students who aren’t there for CS with the same network.

Isn't the fact that these product were not of commercial quality an indication that maybe the courses were not that great? How people can learn building something that is useful, easy to operate and adding value if at a place where they supposed to learn it, they are not taking it seriously or don't have enough skill to teach it? I hope this doesn't look like an attack, I am genuinely interested.

Like most things, I believe the issue comes down to incentives. If you are a university student studying CS, what’s your incentive? To get the best grade possible in your course, most likely. What is your shortest path to a great grade? Is it adding user friendly features? Or demonstrating mastery of applying theoretical principles in software, for example by implementing a novel distributed consensus algorithm? Plus your course lasts at most a semester, to perhaps several years if you are lucky to work on the same project the entire time you’re paying to attend university.

The incentive for commercial companies on the other hand is entirely opposite. Their incentive is to build a product that appeals to the widest population faster than their competitors. They optimize for user friendliness and eschew the untested in favor of hacky solutions that work now. From the developers perspective, they are now paid to work so they have more of an incentive to do things that may not be as attractive to them personally such as fixing bugs.

Also, there is a difference between university and apprenticeship. Traditionally university focused on teaching the soft skills, the “liberal arts”, providing a broad base of knowledge from history to widen the mind of those who attend. It’s not meant to be a job training center. Unfortunately these days it seems that most employers are uninterested in mentoring and apprenticeships, looking for the public to subsidize job training for them. Universities in my opinion are poorly set up for this, but alas this is what most expect.

University programs manned primarily by 18-21 year olds are supposed to compete against for-profit companies with highly experienced and specialized engineering talent?

Shibboleh, a popular but overly-complex SAML implementation (Single Sign-On), used by most universities, was created this way.

Minor nit, it's called Shibboleth (as in Shibboleth Single Sign-on architecture).

Whoops, sorry about the typo.

> You're completely ignoring that I'm complaining about the move to the cloud, and the restrictiveness of the contract. Even just continuing the old contract and staying with offline-Office would have been better.

a cloud is a necessity. it's basically impossible to have a local solution, for every fucking university and most stuff is basically serices built together with closed and open source software, which is a managemend disaster.

> I never even hinted at this being about Microsoft being American. I don't want my University to upload my PII to "the cloud" so I can use Word in a Browser.

your PII is uploaded to so many companies, besides microsoft. microsoft is probably the lesser evil of all these.

> You're basically saying we shouldn't even be trying anymore. Why not shut down the CS departments of universities entirely and just hand out accounts to Skillshare et al., so those still interested in CS can learn from there? There's nothing left a University could offer that you can't access from there. Maybe a couple credits for the Azure cloud if you need to do something computationally intensive.

we should but as of now we should have a intermediate ms solution. btw. the cs departments most of the time do managed services, they do not develop stuff. often they already manage microsoft solutions, so they already use microsoft active directory and exchange. most of them were also breached by hafnium.

what we should do is built a edu cloud (SaaS/PaaS/IaaS) with services (open source) for students and profs, which has a central mail system and is managed centrally. but until this is built you need a working solution.

> Your University surely doesn't have anything left in-house for this anyways.

I'm not a student anymore, but most universities do not have that much selfbuild code lying around anyways. I mean most people working at universities don't care what they os is, they want to use their ms outlook or ms word. of course some universties are way more science oriented and thus more personal wants to use linux & co or write stuff in latex, but that is a minority.

also as soon as you are leaving your university, there are only a handful of corporations where you won't be using a ms product. after hafnium tons of them are also moving to m365.

> a cloud is a necessity

For whom? It's a necessity for software vendors, because they finally have an easy and straightforward way to bill per user.

Nobody needs a cloud based solution, running software on a local machine is a perfectly workable solution.

> Nobody needs a cloud based solution, running software on a local machine is a perfectly workable solution.

Except people who want to collaborate on the internet?

A private corporate internal cloud or internet-faced services doesn't prevent access from the internet.

Just because the server isn't hosted by Microsoft doesn't mean it's inaccessible from the internet...

Used to use this thing back in the day called FTP. Oh, and Usenet! :)

I don't think FTP is acceptable equivalent.

Nope nope nope. Wrong on so many levels.

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